I have been reading the OOXML storm in a teacup for more
than a year now. Am looking forward to the approval of OOXML
as an ISO standard and to be able to move the discussion back
to the things that actually matter: free and open source
software.

For a year, countless bytes have been wasted on what is now
a very difficult plot to follow, specially for people that
have not followed it since the start (or as Bill Maher said
last week "Its like trying to make sense of a LOST episode".
Note: am a Lost fan).

When we go back to what matters, we should be ready to ask
IBM to open source its Lotus Notes software based on Open
Office (as staunch supporters of open formats, and open
source, I think its in their best interest to do so). There
are nice components in Lotus Notes that would be nice to
integrate into the upcoming
OpenOffice 3.

But most importantly, it is a time for all of those strong
advocates of open standards to stop talking, and start
walking. I look forward for all that energy that went into
discussing the pros and cons of OOXML to join an open source
project and start contributing code, documentation, support,
create support forums, file good bug reports and help us make
free and open source software better.

In case you have not been noticing, Apple is gaining market
share on the desktop. Some of our own kernel hackers, desktop
hackers, web hackers that used to be Linux or BSD users are
flocking to the proprietary OSX.

We need to change that, lets reverse that trend, and lets
focus on what actually matters: the free and open source
desktop. To make this happen we will need all the help that
we can get.